Tuesday, July 7, 2015

The French (comics) are coming!

The
French (comics) are coming!

by rick olivares

Last Monday, July 5, the revolutionary
comiXology, the cloud-based comic book sharing platform, announced that they
have expanded their line to include 150 French comics, it was hailed by the
site’s chief executive officer David Steinberger as “game-changing.” One of the
initial offerings is “The Curse of the Wendigo” (“Corpus Hermeticum -- Le
Souffle Du Wendigo published by Soleil Productions in 2009 as written by French
author Missoffe Mathieu and drawn by Charlie Adlard of “The Walking Dead”
fame). The story takes place right before the end of the World War I when
German and French soldiers declare a temporary truce to investigate some
supernatural murders on the Western front. This for sure will grab the
attention of local audiences because of Adlard’s involvement.

New audiences, especially Filipino fans
who are so weaned on American comics, will finally be introduced to the delight
that are Franco-Belgian comics or Bande-Dessinee (or “BD” for short). Unlike
its American or even Filipino counterparts, BDs, most especially since the
1980s are published now in softcover or single-issue format but in hardcover
graphic novel form or albums as they call them. They are hugely popular and
like their other European cousins, have always been socially acceptable as
reading material and literature long before it became mainstream in the United
States.

Like many other comic book fans, my
introduction to BDs was through “The Adventures of Tintin" and
"Asterix the Gaul" as a kid. Quite honestly, I wasn’t enamored by
those two titles until I was much older. I read them but in passing and never
bothered to care for my copies that I soon gave away much to my eternal regret.

By the late 1980s, as I opened my
milieu to the independent comic book scene as whetted by Marvel Comics’ Epic
line, I became exposed to artists and comics from other countries.
Interestingly, it was Epic’s English reprints of Blueberry - an American Western
story featuring the anti-hero of the same title as created by Jean-Michel Charlier
and Jean “Moebius” Giraud -where I started to become a fan of BDs. Now I loved
those Spaghetti Westerns directed by Italians like Sergio Leone and Sergio
Corbucci to name a few so a French comic depicting the American Wild West
definitely appealed to me.

From “Blueberry” I read another of
those Epic BD reprints of "The Incal" by Alejandro Jodorowsky and
Moebius.

"Heavy Metal," the American
version of French fantasy magazine "Metal Hurlant," introduced me to
Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres’ “Valerian and Laureline” during the
1980s.

“Valerian and Laureline” in my opinion
has got to be one of the more influential comics of all time as many American
science fiction films from "Star Wars" to "The Fifth
Element" to “Avatar" have been influenced in some way.

That isn't Princess Leia in a metal bikini but Laureline! And in the clutches of a fat lard of a boss NOT NAMED Jabba the Hutt!

Most recently, I started collecting
Jacques Tardi’s "The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec” about a
mystery writer who finds herself investigating the weird and fantastic in
gaslight-lit Paris in early 20th century France. Shades of Kolchak the
Nightstalker except this is in an altogether a different era. And the title
fits in neatly to all my books of Alan Moore’s “The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen."

When I traveled to France recently, I
picked up a pair of BD’s one of which is Serge Lehman and Stephan Crety’s
“Masque," a story about a former French soldier with mysterious abilities
who is tasked to defend a robot-ravaged Paris Metropole. While looking for
interesting BDs to buy, the store clerk at Album, one of more prominent
Parisian comic book stores sold Masque to me as “sort of a French Batman."

The other BD is Angel Guero &
Alberto Varanda’s “La Geste Des Chevaliers Dragons” (or “The Gestures of the
Dragon Knights”) where the Dragon Knights, an order of warrior virgin women
whose sacred duty is to destroy dragons that plague their world.

For all my love of the superhero genre,
you won’t find too many of these in BDs.

While talking to a comic book
shopkeeper along Rue Dante in St. Germain, he told me, “There are few French
superhero comics.” He showed me a copy of “Titans,” an anthology of Marvel
Comics stories published in 1981 that featured Star Wars, Machine Man, Dazzler,
and a French superhero team called, Mikros. The adventures of this team of
Harvard-educated entomologists and Olympic athletes who were transformed into
insect-sized humanoids by an alien race was created by Marcel Navarro and
Jean-Yves Mitton who used the pseudonyms of Malcolm Naughton and John Milton
respectively to appeal to an English-speaking audience. All their adventures
have since been collected by Sang d’Encre in three albums.

Since the success of Mikros there’s
been a dearth of superheroes.

"Americans do superhero comics so
well,” explained the shopkeeper. “And we French just don’t do it well so we
stick to what we do best - adventure, political satire, humor, fantasy,
history, and science-fiction.”

French comics are coming! And that might not be such a bad thing
at all.